Favoritism Toward Foreign and Domestic Brands: A Comparison of Different Theoretical Explanations

Five theoretical approaches can predict favoritism toward domestic and foreign brands. This article applies a contrastive perspective to examine social identity, personal identity, cultural identity, system justification, and categorical cognition theories and their attendant constructs. The authors propose a set of main-effects hypotheses as well as hypotheses related to both product and country moderation effects on attitudes toward and loyalty to domestic and foreign brands. They test the hypotheses on a sample of Chinese consumers with respect to salient brands from 12 product categories. The results indicate that three of the theoretical approaches examined can explain only one side of favoritism—most commonly favoritism toward domestic brands—but not favoritism toward both domestic and foreign brands. Consumer xenocentrism, a concept rooted in system justification theory, seems to provide more consistent predictions for both domestic- and foreign-brand bias

Divided but united:explaining nested public support for European integration

<p>Academic and general interest in public support for European Integration is on the rise. Theoretically, the utilitarian, identity, reference, cue-taking and signalling models have been developed to explain this perplexing phenomenon. While these models have been tested, there is no comprehensive up-to-date account of how well they perform separately, relative to each other and across levels. Empirically, this study utilises a data set with 110,873 respondents from the European Social Survey. Methodologically, a multilevel model is used to address causal heterogeneity between levels. The study shows that ‘attitudes towards multiculturalism’ at the individual level and ‘corruption’ at the country level are the strongest predictors. When interacting levels within models, it is demonstrated that individual trust in the national political establishment is being moderated by the level of corruption in a country in influencing support for European integration. On this basis, two models are proposed, named the ‘saviour model’ and the ‘anti-establishment model’.</p

Civil conflict, federalism and strategic delegation of leadership

This article analyzes negative externalities that policymakers in one region or group may impose upon the citizens of neighboring regions or groups. These externalities may be material, but they may also be psychological (in the form of envy). The latter form of externality may arise from the production of 'conspicuous' public goods. As a result, decentralized provision of conspicuous public goods may be too high. Potentially, a centralized legislature may internalize negative externalities. However, in a model with strategic delegation, we argue that the median voter in each jurisdiction may anticipate a reduction in local public goods supply and delegate to a policymaker who cares more for public goods than she does herself. This last effect mitigates the expected benefits of policy centralization. The authors' theory is then applied to the setting of civil conflict, where they discuss electoral outcomes in Northern Ireland and Yugoslavia before and after significant institutional changes that affected the degree of centralization. These case studies provide support for the authors' theoretical predictions

Truly reconciled? A dyadic analysis of post-conflict social reintegration in Northern Uganda

In the aftermath of civil war or violent internal conflict, one of the key peacebuilding challenges is the reconciliation of former enemies who are members of the same small-scale societies. A failure of social reintegration may contribute to what is known as a conflict trap. To detect lingering hostile attitudes among a community’s various factions is crucial, but the approaches adopted in previous studies tend to focus on the impact of conflict on one or other aggregated indicator of social cohesion rather than on how violence-affected individuals regard and act towards their fellow community members. Here we demonstrate the value of concentrating on this latter dyadic component of social interactions and we use behavioural experiments and a social tie survey to assess, in an appropriately disaggregated manner, social cohesion in a post-conflict setting in northern Uganda. Whereas in self-reported surveys, ex-combatants appear to be well-connected, active members of their communities, the experiments unveil the continued reluctance of other community members to share or cooperate with them; fewer resources are committed to ex-combatants than to others, which is statistically significant. The dyadic nature of our analysis allows us to detect which groups are more prone to discriminate against ex-combatants, which may help facilitate targeted interventions

The Motivating Role of Dissociative Outgroups in Encouraging Positive Consumer Behaviors

Previous research has found that people tend to avoid products or behaviors that are linked to dissociative reference groups. The present research demonstrates conditions under which consumers exhibit similar behaviors to dissociative out-group members in the domain of positive consumption behaviors. In particular, when a consumer learns that a dissociative out-group performs comparatively well on a positive behavior, the consumer is more likely to respond with positive intentions and actions when the setting is public (vs. private). The authors suggest that this occurs because learning of the successful performance of a dissociative out-group under public conditions threatens the consumer’s group image and activates the desire to present the group image in a positive light. The authors show that although group affirmation mitigates these effects, self-affirmation does not. They also examine the moderating role of the positivity of the behavior and the mediating role of group image motives. Taken together, the results highlight conditions under which communicating information about the behaviors of dissociative out-groups can be used to spur consumers to engage in positive actions

Can Terrorism Abroad Influence Migration Attitudes at Home?

This article demonstrates that public opinion on migration “at home” is systematically driven by terrorism in other countries. Although there is little substantive evidence linking refugees or migrants to most recent terror attacks in Europe, news about terrorist attacks can trigger more negative views of immigrants. However, the spatial dynamics of this process are neglected in existing research. We argue that feelings of imminent danger and a more salient perception of migration threats do not stop at national borders. The empirical results based on spatial econometrics and data on all terrorist attacks in Europe for the post-9/11 period support these claims. The effect of terrorism on migration concern is strongly present within a country, but also diffuses across states in Europe. This finding improves our understanding of public opinion on migration, spill-over effects of terrorism, and it highlights crucial lessons for scholars interested in the security implications of population movements

Ethnocentrism in the Netherlands: A typological analysis

Contains fulltext : 3327.pdf (publisher's version ) (Open Access)In research on unfavourable attitudes towards outgroups, the related favourable attitude towards the ingroup is generally ignored. Sumner (1906) called the presence of both related attitudes ethnocentrism. Since then only a small amount of empirical research has been dedicated to this theme. Based oh survey-data from a representative sample of Dutch citizens (N= 1,799) taken in 1985, this article concludes that ethnocentrism exists in The Netherlands. This contains unfavourable stereotypes about several outgroups as well as favourable stereotypes about the ingroup. The latter dimension also refers to nationalistic feelings. Both attitudes are highly related to each other. In this study the social and cultural pattern of ethnocentric people is shown to be of an authoritarian-conservative nature